Dr. Gilbert Lai is a mentor for the FIRST Robotics team SWAT 771. He is helping an all girls team from grades 7-12 design a basketball-shooting robot for this year’s annual FIRST Robotics Competition. Dr. Lai is using MapleSim and Maple to help the team understand the principles involved and design their robot. This blog post is part of a series that chronicles the progress of the team. Posts in the series include:

Dr. Gilbert Lai is a mentor for the FIRST Robotics team SWAT 771. He is helping an all girls team from grades 7-12 design a basketball-shooting robot for this year’s annual FIRST Robotics Competition. Dr. Lai is using MapleSim and Maple to help the team understand the principles involved and design their robot. This blog post is part of a series that chronicles the progress of the team. Posts in the series include:

Dr. Gilbert Lai is a mentor for the FIRST Robotics team SWAT 771. He is helping an all girls team from grades 7-12 design a basketball-shooting robot for this year’s annual FIRST Robotics Competition. Dr. Lai is using MapleSim and Maple to help the team understand the principles involved and design their robot. This blog post is part of a series that chronicles the progress of the team. Posts in the series include:

A recent Tips and Techniques article in the Maple Reporter contained the following five "gems" from my Red Book of Maple Magic. These 'gems' are tricks and techniques for Maple that I've discovered in my years here at Maplesoft. The previous 15 gems have appeared in three other issues of the Reporter, as...

Liquid flowing in a pipeline has inertia. If a valve at the end of the pipeline suddenly closes, a pressure surge hits the valve, and travels through the pipeline at the speed of sound. The damping effect of fluid friction gradually attenuates the pressure wave.

This phenomenon is called water hammer and can cause damage significant damage, sometimes even rupturing the pipeline.

National Public Radio in the USA carries Car Talk, a humorous phone-in program in which Tom and Ray Magliozzi (Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers) diagnose and offer solutions for mysterious auto-related maladies. It's an amusing hour on Saturday mornings.

On November 22, Joe Riel posted an implicit differentiation problem that caught my attention. It took the manipulations typically learned in an Advanced Calculus course one step further, but the devices learned in such a course could readily be applied. Joe's solution was expressed in terms of exterior...

Today we've lost computing pioneer Dennis Ritchie. For those not familiar with Dr. Ritchie, he was the co-inventor of the Unix operating system (with Ken Thompson), and the C programming language (with Brian Kernighan), both of which are an integral part of Maple's history.

When Gaston Gonnet implemented the very first version of the Maple kernel, he wanted to do it in the then-new C language, for the hardware and operating system independence that it provided. Unfortunately,...

MapleSim has been delivering unique advantages in physical modeling and system simulation for many years. Today we release the latest iteration: MapleSim 5. Looking back at some of the earlier versions of our software, it is hard to believe that this is the same product; from the user interface to the component libraries to the simulation engine, every part of the system has experienced a striking evolution.

Like its predecessors, MapleSim 5 is based on the Maple mathematical...